


And They Talk About It Still

by DinosaurTheology



Series: Johnny and Dora [8]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Engagement, F/M, Fluff, Marriage Proposal, Short, Short & Sweet, Short One Shot, Sweet, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:52:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7217743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake met Amy in the evidence room, worked together in there and even made out there a few times. Where better, then, to ask her to be your wife?</p>
            </blockquote>





	And They Talk About It Still

**Author's Note:**

> The 99 and those who dwell within aren't mind but I love em like bros and sis's. This story seemed like a good way to get over strep throat and celebrate my first three weeks of EMS training, yay!

He met her for the first time in the 99's evidence lock-up. It was four years ago and Jake Peralta felt like king of the cats. 2012 had been a good time. Only having just put on the gold shield about six months before, himself, he'd already brought down two muggers, a serial flasher and even his first murderer. And yeah, sure it had been just some dumb mutt who'd bashed his landlady over the head with a clothes iron over that month's rent and not some wild-ass psycho like Buffalo Bill but... it was someone who'd killed another human being and he, little Jakey from where Crown Heights and Flatbush came together with less of a bang than a muffled "Oy, vey!" had brought the sonovabitch down.

So yeah, okay... maybe he was celebrating. Just a little bit. And maybe he was doing it in the ever so slightly unseemly fashion of doing what Captain McGintley called "that embarassing little booty dance you do" and singing "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace. All of these were things that he might or might not have been doing when Amy Santiago, newly a detective and fresh out of the neatly pressed navy blue uniform of the perfect patrol officer she'd been, padded softly into his life for the first time.

"Daddy was a cop... on the east side of Chicago." He twirled past boxes of casefiles and Rosa's famous bag of hands. "Back in the USA, back in the bad old days." He paused for effect, really milking the drama of the moment, singing into the butt of his Glock 19 which was unloaded because, hey, he wasn't Norm Scully, after all. He did have a reason to live--mainly that he'd closed his first homicide and would close a billion more and go on to eradicate crime in Brooklyn before going on to become the first Jewish President of the United States. "In the heat of a summer night, in the land of the dollar bill. It was the night Chicago died, and we talk about it still. When a man named Al Capone, came to make that town his own. So he called his gang to war with the forces of the law."

A quiet voice, gently feminine and choked with amusement, broke his concentration. "You know that's not how it happened, right?"

He lost his gun, balance and cool all the same instant before turning to face what appeared to be either his new co-worker or a fifteen year old Police Explorer cadet with the biggest, nerdiest glasses and most severely twisted bun in Brooklyn, maybe all five burroughs. Time to get it back, Jakey, he thought. Don't look like a total doofus in front of the new chick. "What not happened?" He said. "Things that happen that are not you don't!" Yeah. That was the stuff. Turn on that scintillating Peralta charm, Jakey. If it worked for your dad on tipsy flight attendants it would tumble anyone, right?

She rolled the hugest, deepest brown eyes he'd ever seen. They were the kind of eyes a man could go swimming in and not care if the undertow pulled him out of hope of ever reaching land. Maybe it was just because of those ridiculous glasses? "I mean that it didn't go down like that. With Al Capone. There wasn't any huge, apocalyptic battle between his gang and the police. He was arrested for tax evasion in 1931, spent eleven years between Atlanta U.S. and Alcatraz and died in 1947 of cardiac arrest--probably a complication of syphillis."

"First of all," he said. "Ew. Ew. My story is better, even if it's not true. And second they should really put you in charge of community education. If people knew about the syphillis..." He mimed wiping his brow. "Whew! The thug life would look a lot less appealing."

"I thought so too," she said, "but my last lieutenant was just like my teachers when I was in school." She mimicked a stern, authoritative voice. "There's such a thing as being TOO well informed, Amy!"

"There is not!" he said. "Especially about syphillis. I mean... would you want that sneaking up on you?"

She shook her head. "Especially since it'll eventually make your nose rot off and stuff. I've read that our noses are what separates our faces from animals."

Great. He'd met the female Charles Boyle. At least she was cuter than the genuine article. "So... I'm Jake Peralta, the 99's best detective and your new hero and idol. You must be Amy Santiago."

"Guilty as charged." She navigated her mountain of paperwork to reach out and shake his hand. "It's good to meet you. I think. I never know when the conversation has been, you know... about Al Capone and syphillis."

He briefly clasped her small fingers, felt a thrill of electricity that might have just been cool air run through his body. "A conversation like that can never be the wrong kind," he said. "Where were you before? With that ass goblin lou?"

"I worked the 69."

He could not help it. This was... there were things a man could not bear. "Great title for a sex tape!"

Her brow furrowed. "Excuse me?"

"I, you know what..." He stammered. "You know what, just... ignore me." He pulled one of his faces. "My brain gets really dumb sometimes. Just... welcome to the 99, Amy Santiago."

She smiled. It was honey sweet and shy as an African violent. "Thank you, Jake Peralta. You've sure made it an interesting first morning." He watched her go, unable to tear his eyes away from the hypnotizing roll of her hips in a sensible pantsuit.

And that had been it. As far as meet-cutes went it wasn't the worst, he supposed, and had presaged great things to come in his very evidence lock-up. They'd worked there side by side, grown close as friends and more, snuck off to steal a few brief kisses when the urge became so great that it could not wait for them to get home and fall on one another like a man and woman on the urge of starvation. And now... now he would--he sincerely, fervently hoped--take their relationship to the next level in this cramped, dingy room.

If Eddie Fung dared show his face Jake swore to God Almighty that he'd blow the creep's head off.

She waddles in, five months pregnant and beginning to really show because she is a truly tiny person. Gina refers to her as the "Precious Little Pumpkin" not quite as viciously as she usually hangs nicknames on people and Charles has already gotten them a sitz bath for her feet well ahead of the baby shower. "It's not quite washing your lover's hair," he told Jake over jellied bat paste with lemongrass and Thai basil (his) and a great big Bruno Sammartino (Jake's), "but when my sister was pregnant with her second she had the same awful swollen ankles. We thought it would just about kill her and the sitz bath was almost the only thing that would help... well, that and her husband massaging them." He pondered, then, folding bat paste back and forth on his tongue. "I really think that may be where my brother-in-law's foot fetish might have come from."

Charles is a super sweet guy, Jake knows, even if he is truly the weirdest person he knows that is not currently on death row for boiling members of the clergy alive. They use the sitz bath and try massage. Even if it has not, thus far, resulted in a foot fetish it has made her feel a little better and that's worth it as far as he's concerned.

She's an angel in maternity wear, forehead dewed with late spring Brooklyn perspiration where it gets more humid in early June than Satan's taint. She has on those big, dorky ridiculous glasses that make her look like a shy, wise librarian permanently on the verge of shushing someone, painfully cute, that have become a weird element of all his fantasies. A smile tugs the edge of her lips. "Fancy meeting you here, Detective Peralta. I might starting thinking you were waiting on me."

"Maybe I was." He folds to one knee, reaches into his pocket and produces a black box from Catbird.

"Jake..." she says. "You're not doing something goofy, are you?"

"Probably," he says. "Probably the goofiest thing I've ever done. But I can't stop myself." He slips the Leda the Swan ring on her finger and speaks again, voice choked. "Detective Amy Santiago, will you make me the happiest man in the world and do me the honor of being my wife?"

She doesn't answer for a moment, can't, but then leans over with as much grace as she manage--it really isn't much--and kisses him on the lips. "So," he says, "I'm gonna take that as a yes and not just the easiest let down, like, ever?" By way of answer she holds his face tight between her small hands, kisses him again and doesn't let go for a long, long time. It might well be for the rest of their lives.


End file.
